IDE hard drive on original IBM AT?

[Scott Stevens]

On Thu, 14 Jul 2005 16:29:38 -0700
Marvin Johnston <marvin at rain.org> wrote:

> 
> I haven't tried using an IDE drive with a real IBM AT, but I suspect
> it will not be plug and play! The original BIOS supports 15 predefined
> drive types and I don't remember any user defined settings. You might
> try something like "Disk Manager" or other such utilities. IIRC, they
> can allow larger than the 32 MB partition sizes and I *think* will
> allow settings other than what IBM provided.
> 

Depending on how much you want to mess around with the BIOS, there are
utilties out there that let you patch in whatever drive geometry you
want into a BIOS binary and reburn a new EPROM.  I used that ages ago
when I had a 20 MHz '286 motherboard and wanted to use an oddball hard
drive geometry in it.  The process does involve buring a new EPROM,
though.  And I don't remember the name of the utility, but that it was
some common tool off a shareware CDROM collection (this was
pre-internet) so it's probabably physically out there on CDs.